Personal responsibility? That's for liberals and black people, we guess.

But his denial yesterday on his Fox News show went beyond mere cries
of "bloody shirt!" -- though it contained that, too. What he attempted
to do was claim some kind of equivalence and another Oakland incident
involving shots fired at the police -- even though the claim is just
nakedly false:

The next thing is, they're painting people into terrorists -- painting people into dangers.
Um, you know, we had a sniper in, um, Oakland, California, trying to
kill police. At the same time we have another guy who appears to be
against the Tides Foundation, uh, and he goes down and he's going to try
to kill people at the Tides Foundation. I'm tied to the Tides
Foundation in this story because, quote, how scary is this? We have
searched all the television records and Glenn Beck is the only host that
spoke about the Tides Foundation in the past year. That's terrifying.

But I'm tied to that. But nobody's even talking about the sniper from the left trying to shoot the police officer.

So where do you stand on violence?

Let's parse this carefully, because it's important to understand just how deep Beck's mendacity is here.
First, let's be clear that no one is "painting" Glenn Beck as a
terrorist -- and there should be no question, frankly, that Byron
Williams fully intended to be a terrorist.

More significant, though, is the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that the sniper case in Oakland involved any political motive at all. As you can see from the Oakland Tribune report,
this appeared to be largely a case of someone who was angered by a
police drug bust, or simply hated cops. That stands in direct contrast
to the Williams case, which was unmistakably motivated by political
hatred.

She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a
cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment
and about "what's happening to our country."Williams watched the news on television and was upset by
"the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda
items," his mother said.

... She said she then checked the locked safe where she kept her
guns, all legally purchased and owned, and found that they were also
missing.

Janice Williams said she kept the guns because "eventually, I think we're going to be caught up in a revolution." But she said she had told her son many times that "he didn't have to be on the front lines."

And how did Byron Williams come to choose the Tides Foundation as a
target? What television show did he watch that made him think the Tides
Foundation was an evil entity worthy of being shot up and terrorized.

Moreover, Beck is being disingenuous in the extreme to describe his
role in this as merely "talking about" the Tides Foundation -- he
viciously (and groundlessly) demonized them as an organization intended
to "destroy capitalism", a "Trojan horse" engaged in "indoctrinating
children" and "warping your children's brains" with the idea that
"capitalism is evil", the "nastiest of the nasty," a bunch of "far left
radicals" who are "infiltrating" and "failing capitalism" so they can
"destroy it."

These are all utterly false and base smears, of course. But if you
were a violent and gullible right-winger prone to anger, you probably
would be inspired by this kind of rhetoric to try to take them out.
Which fits the description of Byron Williams to a T.

Because we believe in freedom of speech and freedom of
thought, there will probably always be haters like Richard Poplawski
among us. Inevitably they will be driven by fear: the fear of
difference. Because to them, difference of any kind is a threat.

And what we know from experience about volatile, unstable actors like
them is that they can be readily induced into violent action by hateful
rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes other people. And thanks to
human nature and those same freedoms, we will certainly always have
fearmongering demagogues among us. But the purveyors of such profoundly
irresponsible rhetoric need to be called on it -- especially when they
hold the nation's media megaphones.

Tragically, it's becoming increasingly clear that both Beck and Fox
News have no intention whatsoever of stopping this profoundly
irresponsible behavior. Which means that he's going to continue whipping
up violent, unstable nutcases with his scapegoating and demonization.

Which means that someday, someone is going to finally succeed in a
violent attack on one of his targets. Someday, there will be a lot of
people killed by one of Beck's eager acolytes. Someday, he won't be able
to hide behind his whining that eeeevil libruls are trying to "silence"
him. Someday, it will be unmistakably clear to everyone exactly what he
has been doing. Someday, he will be finally, irrevocably, disgraced.

We will all be in mourning that day. But it seems that until then, he will never stop.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.